First of all, don't stop posting because checking into this thread every few months is my own personal General Hospital.

Our first TiVo was 60 hrs. and did fine by us for many years before we bumped it up to 100 or so. You're right that the 300 hr. machine will keep her occupied for a while, but it won't be a permanent solution. Eventually, 300 hrs. won't be enough, then 500 hrs. won't be enough, etc. As you said, she already regrets getting rid of those tapes she purged. She's still hoarding and she's able to see that more space will allow her to save more (even if she doesn't *mean* to---how many years has she been saying she'd find time to 'catch up'?). If you're skeptical, consider that when you offered her the 300 hr. box *plus* the DVD recorder *plus* the VCR, she said *you* were being selfish for not letting her use your 100 hr. machine as well. There will never be enough space to permanently sate her.

Having the whole family take a break from the TiVo probably is an excellent idea. No, you aren't addicted to your TiVo, but your relationship with your wife with regards to the TiVos has become very complex. She may not be able to work through the issues she needs to address if you still have a functioning TiVo. I know, even if I knew I had a problem, I would definitely resent my husband for indulging in my addiction around me (even if it was when I was out of the house/asleep) much like an alcoholic has trouble seeing others drink socially. You are watching your TiVo responsibly, but together you and your wife are really struggling to manage your TiVo resources and the 'mine/yours' approach just isn't working (and won't work again once she fills up her 300 hrs.). You need a dramaticly different approach to resolve the issue and if no one is using TiVo, then everyone can work together on finding ways to meet their needs TiVo-less. Yeah, you'll lose some time, but if it strengthens your relationship, it will hopefully be worth the sacrifice.

Oh, and if you do upgrade (and it sounds like you're going in that direction) and are worried about her missing programming, I have an idea. Buy another Series 2, set up the shows she wants for the time hers will be in the shop, subscribe the machine (hrm, not in that order), upgrade hers, then cancel the subscription anre return the S2 (once she's watched/offloaded what she recorded, that is). If she doesn't get the shows off the "rented" machine before the return deadline, then she'll have to cough up the price of the machine. *And* once you've upgraded, don't just hide your remote. Our old S1/DTiVo/S2 remotes work completely interchangeably in our house, so she'd be able to use her remote to set up shows on your TiVo. Clear her stuff off, then set up parental controls so she can't set up anything to record on your machine. That will probably upset her, but you can tell her you love her and that you got her a Netflix subscription. Not only can she get movies, but they have a *lot* of boxed sets of television programs. About the only things she'd miss are daytime programming and sports (and shows so bad *nobody* wants them on DVD).

Oh, and if you do upgrade (and it sounds like you're going in that direction) and are worried about her missing programming, I have an idea. Buy another Series 2, set up the shows she wants for the time hers will be in the shop, subscribe the machine (hrm, not in that order), upgrade hers, then cancel the subscription anre return the S2 (once she's watched/offloaded what she recorded, that is). If she doesn't get the shows off the "rented" machine before the return deadline, then she'll have to cough up the price of the machine. *And* once you've upgraded, don't just hide your remote. Our old S1/DTiVo/S2 remotes work completely interchangeably in our house, so she'd be able to use her remote to set up shows on your TiVo. Clear her stuff off, then set up parental controls so she can't set up anything to record on your machine. That will probably upset her, but you can tell her you love her and that you got her a Netflix subscription. Not only can she get movies, but they have a *lot* of boxed sets of television programs. About the only things she'd miss are daytime programming and sports (and shows so bad *nobody* wants them on DVD).

Good luck!

If He gets another Series 2, he'd better work fast and get it from somewhere with a liberal return policy.

Due to the One year commitment of TiVo service that is now required, of course.

I just read this read from start to finish. I think I must go hug my sweeties now. We've survived for YEARS (since 9/2000) with our original Series 1 35 hour DirecTiVo (3 adults in the house, 40-some season passes, no archiving). The second TiVo mentioned in my sig was just purchased off ebay and is en-route - we were spurred to upgrade because of the Series3 buzz which jostled us out of our rut.

Well, I have had the new hard drive here for a couple of weeks, but I haven't installed it yet. It has to be on a Friday or Saturday evening, because I'm going to do the lengthy copy operation of her backlog onto it overnight which means the installation must begin at night and complete in the morning. (i.e. I'll be sleeping during the copy operation.) So I can't really do it on a morning when I go to work. So far, her To Do List has prevented me from doing it on any weekend. I told her I don't want to put this off, because for one thing, what if the hard drive is bad? I would need to make a warranty claim during the warranty period.

But tonight I intend to do this. In 15 minutes, her To Do List is about to hit a gap, and starting 10:30 tonight her To Do List will be idle until 2:30 tommorrow afternoon. This presents a window of opportunity for me to upgrade her. So barring technical difficulties, our Holy Ground rules of my TiVo is mine, and hers is hers will be reinstated by tommorrow morning. I've just talked to her tonight and gotten her to sign off on this renewed treaty/contract/understanding.

She blames a lot of her backlog on trying to keep up with General Hospital, and she said she's seriously considering canceling that SP.

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lol I just read all 14 pages of this, when I already should've been asleep... Definitely interesting. I think those hassling him for "putting up with" his wife and her habits should really get off of his back. Everyone handles situations differently, he chose to try to work with her through it all which I think is wonderful. It may have been a pain in the rear and 3 years later he may still be back at square one dealing with the same issue, but marriage is all about cooperation and working things through.

But before i went to sleep I wanted to pipe in and just add that i watch General hospital every day, and have since I was born (my mom watched it every day...). You honestly could delete two-three weeks worth of shows and she'd probably still know exactly everything that was going on in the new episodes. They tend to drag out story lines ridiculously lol..... I'll miss a weeks worth of shows and then pick back up and it'll be like I never missed a single moment...

lol I just read all 14 pages of this, when I already should've been asleep... Definitely interesting. I think those hassling him for "putting up with" his wife and her habits should really get off of his back. Everyone handles situations differently, he chose to try to work with her through it all which I think is wonderful. It may have been a pain in the rear and 3 years later he may still be back at square one dealing with the same issue, but marriage is all about cooperation and working things through.

But before i went to sleep I wanted to pipe in and just add that i watch General hospital every day, and have since I was born (my mom watched it every day...). You honestly could delete two-three weeks worth of shows and she'd probably still know exactly everything that was going on in the new episodes. They tend to drag out story lines ridiculously lol..... I'll miss a weeks worth of shows and then pick back up and it'll be like I never missed a single moment...

My fiancée and her best friend were GH-aholoics. It started to draw me in for a few weeks, but when I realized that nothing ever fully resolves, I quit watching. My fiancée quit a few weeks later of her own free will(really...). Her friend had a different solution: when she starts getting back-logged, she'll just watch the friday episodes, which are apparently the 'good ones', where all the action of the week generally takes place.

So: even more hours than I'd hoped. (340 hours now, more than quadrupling her space. ) -- of course that's 340 hours of basic quality, which in the real world is much less. Still, her space is more than quadrupled, because before she had 80 hours of basic quality.

BTW, isn't there a screen that will show me how many hours there are at Basic vs Good vs High vs Best quality?

Edit: I just notice the pic is gone. It's because my geocities account was purged some time ago. When I get home, I'll upload the pic to my photobucket account, as I know I still have the pic.

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However, to answer your question, it wasn't all that smooth. I got stuck on the part where I needed to download the MFS utilities for SIX HOURS.

The last time I did an upgrade, I made a boot diskette with these utilities, but that only works if the HD < 137 GB. Since my new HD = 300GB, I needed a boot CD, not a boot diskette. I struggled quite a bit in burning one that would actually be bootable. Windows XP burning commands didn't seem to work, so then I downloaded a trial version of NERO, and that didn't work either. Finally after a LONG time, I decided to install NERO on my second computer. I immediately had better luck, as I could now see not just an ISO file burning, but the files that are inside the ISO file were starting to be viewable, where before they weren't. But I kept erroring out towards the end of the burn. I went through more than a dozen CDs before I got a successful burn. It could be my CDs are old and gone bad, or maybe, when I was tweaking the NERO settings (burn speed, etc), I just stumbled on a setting that worked.

Once I got that bootable CD, the rest was easy. I'm saving that CD in case I ever do another upgrade. Next upgrade will be easy, now that I have this CD.

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Ever since I upgraded her TiVo I've lived in TiVo happiness once again.

She still has some stuff on my TiVo, but she's steadily draining it off, and there is no inflow of shows to counteract the outflow. (i.e. all her new To Do's are going to her TiVo, not mine.) So her list of shows on my TiVo is steadily shrinking. I now have two screens of Suggestions.

I actually have more of my own backlog than I've had in a long time. But if it gets too out of hand, I can suspend or cancel one of my SPs, or let KUSN handle it. But the main thing is, I have control over my TiVo.

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Ever since I upgraded her TiVo I've lived in TiVo happiness once again.

She still has some stuff on my TiVo, but she's steadily draining it off, and there is no inflow of shows to counteract the outflow. (i.e. all her new To Do's are going to her TiVo, not mine.) So her list of shows on my TiVo is steadily shrinking. I now have two screens of Suggestions.

I actually have more of my own backlog than I've had in a long time. But if it gets too out of hand, I can suspend or cancel one of my SPs, or let KUSN handle it. But the main thing is, I have control over my TiVo.

I really don't use Suggestions.
I have 200 GB on one TiVo and 240 GB on the other and I often save shows for viewing during the lull periods.

Buy her a Tivo and have her pay the monthly fee on it if she wants to fill it up with her videos. I believe Tivo has something where they only charge you 6.95 a month for the second Tivo, check it out. If it is true just buy a bigger Tivo for yourself and give the smaller one to her.

Buy her a Tivo and have her pay the monthly fee on it if she wants to fill it up with her videos. I believe Tivo has something where they only charge you 6.95 a month for the second Tivo, check it out. If it is true just buy a bigger Tivo for yourself and give the smaller one to her.

I was alarmed yesterday when I took a peek at my wife's recently enlarged TiVo and found only 4 shows in Recently Deleted. It made me think it was already mostly filled up. That would have been horrible as it would make me think that my TiVo might soon get retargeted by her ravenous TiVo-appetite.

But I talked to her, and it turns out that she oftens manually deletes stuff from Recently Deleted. I told her that's not needed, because RD doesn't subtract from available space. Her reasoning is that she likes to delete stuff she knows she will absolutely never need to undelete, so that, in a way, she is controlling which part of the RD folders deletes first, thus sort of protecting the RD entries that might have a small chance of eventually needing to be undeleted.

Whew! She still has lots of space.

Oh, by the way, she's been steadily taping off the General Hospital eps from my TiVo, and there is only one ep left on it. Plus there's just a few assorted over entries on my Now Playing that are hers. I notice though that there are at least a dozen General Hospital eps on her TiVo. Plus, I bet she hasn't had time to watch the taped backlog of General Hospital, so when I remember, I think I'll ask her if she's still considering giving up her General Hospital.

Oh, I guess I could also mention to her a tip that I read earlier in this thread from sombody: that she could just skip two weeks of it, and still figure out what she missed by watching the later eps.

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WOW! I just got a chuckle out of a conversation I just now had with my wife. I asked her what the latest is with her idea of nixing her General Hospital SP and her stoppage of watching that show. I noticed she has as lot of eps of it on her TiVo.

She told me that she wants to watch it until they kill off 'Manny' (whoever that is), and see a little of the aftermath of it, then she'll stop watching the show, because the rest of the subplots are getting silly lately. I then asked her how far behind she is in watching the show.

She said she's up the JUNE 29TH EPISODE!! . WOW! That means she's got THREE MONTHS of that show's eps stored up waiting to watch. I know that at least a month of that, maybe more, is sitting on VHS tapes, and the rest is in her Now Playing. I told her that this is an amazing amount of backlog. She replied that she's an amazing person.

The other problem is that since she's this far behind, she doesn't know the air date of the last eps she'll be interested in watching. In fact, Manny's death may have happened weeks or months ago, and she doesn't know it yet, so she may be needlessly recording more eps of the SP. She won't know until she watches it. So meanwhile, to be safe, she still records the daily ep of General Hospital. Whenever she catches up and watches all the eps from June 29th until the point where she's satisified, then she'll delete the SP and also delete all the excess eps she's got on her TiVo.

So at least there's a light at the end of this tunnel.

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Oh by the way, she has officially killed the General Hospital SP. I'm not sure if she's still watching the backlog or not though. Hopefully she's done watching it. She told me a couple weeks ago that the SP has been axed. But the funny thing is, just the other day she told me that Luke and Laura are going to be on General Hosptal together again, so I wonder how she knows this if she axed the SP? I think I should ask her this.

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Oh by the way, she has officially killed the General Hospital SP. I'm not sure if she's still watching the backlog or not though. Hopefully she's done watching it. She told me a couple weeks ago that the SP has been axed. But the funny thing is, just the other day she told me that Luke and Laura are going to be on General Hosptal together again, so I wonder how she knows this if she axed the SP? I think I should ask her this.

Maybe she's reading the latest soap magazines or the soap internet sites. I think it goes like this, Laura has awoken from a three year coma ......

I was alarmed yesterday when I took a peek at my wife's recently enlarged TiVo and found only 4 shows in Recently Deleted. It made me think it was already mostly filled up. That would have been horrible as it would make me think that my TiVo might soon get retargeted by her ravenous TiVo-appetite.

But I talked to her, and it turns out that she oftens manually deletes stuff from Recently Deleted. I told her that's not needed, because RD doesn't subtract from available space. Her reasoning is that she likes to delete stuff she knows she will absolutely never need to undelete, so that, in a way, she is controlling which part of the RD folders deletes first, thus sort of protecting the RD entries that might have a small chance of eventually needing to be undeleted.

Hmmmm, I wonder if there isn't another reason she's deleting from Recently Deleted.

Oh, I caught her watching General Hospital last night, and she admits she's back to watching it again. I think the return of Luke and Laura was too much for her to resist. I'm curious what sort of backlog she has of General Hospital, but she was in sort of a snippy mood last night, so I didn't ask. Well my upgrade to her TiVo is still working nicely though, and she still is off of my TiVo.

I'm actually down to less than 2 screens of suggestions on my TiVo, but it's my fault, not my wife's. I'm caught up on all my shows, except I must have a month worth of Simpsons eps on there. That's clearly too much, and I consider the Simpsons my lowest priority SP, so I'm considering just deleting a bunch of eps off my NP. I'm not deleting the SP because I watch Simpsons sometimes. But I don't need 60 eps on my NP.

I also have Simpsons set as KUSN, so I really could just let it fill up and then I'll lose my old eps. The only reason I'm considering not doing that is because I like having a certain amount of Suggestions, so I don't think I'm going to let my TiVo fill up.

Unlike my wife though, I don't feel compelled to watch all those back eps. I'll just delete them. (I can't remember if I said earlier in the thread, that the reason there are so many of these eps is because Simpsons shows reruns all the time, but they're not reruns to me, because I haven't been watching the Simpsons for quite a few years. I must say I like the show, now that I'm watching it.)

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